Romanticizing the Chinese Landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through an analysis of Thomas Allom and George Newenham Wright’s four-volume China, in a Series of Views, Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire (1843), this essay argues that mid-nineteenth-century domestic Sinology appropriated Romantic ideology and poetry to situate China within the British Empire. While Britain’s Chinese colonial acquisitions never extended beyond the infamous ceding of Hong Kong at the end of the Opium War (1839–1842), the British military victory over China provided domestic Sinologists with the latitude to admire the “exotic” locale while couching this admiration in familiar imperialist rhetoric. In so doing, domestic Sinology – both visual and textual – imaginatively surrenders the entirety of China, not just Hong Kong, to British rule. As Allom and Wright’s text demonstrates, domestic Sinology often relied upon Romantic ideology and literature to achieve this imaginative acquiescence. This incongruous use of Romanticism made it complicit in Britain’s imperial development in the Far East.